U-turns and policy-making

For my first post I thought I would write about the announcement made this week by David Willetts, the universities minister, that students from wealthy families may be able to buy places at top universities.

I'm not going to rant and rave about the injustice of the proposal, although I think it is wrong for many reasons, but make a comment instead on what this says about the Coalition's policy-making process.

The Government's u-turn, which seemed inevitable from the moment the policy was aired, happened on the same day, so it probably won the prize for the quickest policy reversal in recent memory. Yet the most important feature of the story is that it is clearly part of a definable trend.

The first policy reversal was probably the school sports u-turn, followed by the decision not to sell-off part of the nation's forestry. We have of course seen a remarkable change of direction over the NHS plans, as well as a less publicised announcement about plans to slow down the scale of public sector outsourcing. Now we have Willetts' humiliation. That is five on my count, and there are probably more.

What does this suggest about Coalition policy-making? In crude terms, it seems that they are not thinking things through, in terms of the objectives of policy, the practicalities and the public reaction. The strategy seems to be to work-up and announce a new policy and, if all these three things work against it, dump it. Usually, you would expect these factors to be thought through during the early stages of the policy-making process.

Why might this be? In a Dispatches documentary this week, Cameron and Clegg both said they been strongly influenced by Tony Blair's belief that he was far too slow during New Labour's first term and, as a result, what he came to see as his central domestic mission - public sector reform - never quite reached the heights he had hoped.

Cameron seems to think that his government must avoid - at all costs - taking things slowly. And I think this is probably why there have been so many ill-thought through policies. What Cameron must learn - and there is scant evidence that he is doing so - is that policy-making is a long, difficult process which must account for a multitude of variables.

This week should have been a good one for Cameron, given his party's good local election results and Labour's very mixed ones. However, if Cameron doesn't learn the lesson of the u-turn, he may find that more good weeks are turned to bad.